


The Boy in the Blue Hood

by Kanthia



Series: every flying whale is the wind fish [3]
Category: The Legend of Zelda & Related Fandoms, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Genre: Gen, Psychological, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-15
Updated: 2018-02-15
Packaged: 2019-03-19 04:37:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,931
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13697007
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kanthia/pseuds/Kanthia
Summary: He wonders who or what buried all those monks’ desiccated remains in the ground, and why they did it, and why they passed on once he visited them, and if it was all for him; and how rude it is to write all that suffering into the earth just for one person, and if he should fear whoever did that more than he fears the vague red thing perched on Hyrule Castle; but there is no time for frivolous questions, not when there’s a world to be saved.





	The Boy in the Blue Hood

**Author's Note:**

> “I certainly wasn't happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can't earn, and can't keep, and often don't even recognize at the time; I mean joy.”
> 
> (Ursula Le Guin, _The Left Hand of Darkness_ )

_Link?_

At the start of it all --

Well, there’s a voice in his head imploring him to open his eyes, the air in his lungs, and a name that is his. Link wakes to the feeling of a good night’s sleep and the taste of wool and blood in his mouth, cold water, the scent of metal. Beyond that there’s a strangely overwhelming sense of peace and rightness edged with another, darker emotion, something he can’t quite place. It’s like a cloud ringed in grey. It’s the way the air smells before a storm.  
  
It’s a lot to take in.

Link, who knows very little beyond the fact that he’s fairly certain he knows how to use a sword, follows the call of the voice into the bright morning sun, the pain on his eyelids nothing compared to the feeling of the earth beneath his feet; it reminds him of something. There’s an old man down the hill to his right, silently pondering a fire; that reminds him of something, too. There’s a strange, dreamlike sensation hanging in his mind -- not foreign but familiar, the memory of someone saying _I wanted to wait for you_.

Far, far to the northwest there’s what appears to be a great bird hanging in the sky. That reminds him of something, too.

And he wonders who carved a plateau just for him.

* * *

  
Take, for example, the Duelling Peaks: something dredged that path through the mountains, a god or a river, with violence or with the relentless pain of time; laid a winding path through their bellies that urges him eastward. With stubbornness and patience he resists the call of duty long enough to climb the north peak and is gifted a shrine for his efforts. Link, still learning exactly who he is, has discovered that he is the kind of person who likes to sit on mountaintops at night; back on the Great Plateau he’d sat atop Mount Hylia for hours beside the dead king’s ghost, trying to relearn old constellations, though none of the stars made sense.

The old man had said, _go east to Kakariko Town and find Impa there._  Link thought in that moment that he would much rather go to the mountain spewing fire to the northeast, or past the rocky crags to the south of Mount Hylia to see if there was a world beyond the mountains; but then the man who was once king had said, _she may help you remember._

So he had taken the sailcloth and the king’s old doublet and turned beyond the shadow of the stony cradle that had rocked him awake. Hopped over the edge of the Great Plateau and unfurled the glider, hanging in the air with nowhere to go but down, gently down, a tug on his arms and a pleasant, cool breeze blowing off of Mount Hylia.

Where he had expected nothing but trees and overgrown ruins he found instead a road, and a bridge, and a man who spoke a language he understood who pointed him towards the Dueling Peaks and the stable beyond. _You’ll get a bed and a meal there,_ he says, in an accent Link finds familiar. _No offence, but you look like you could use something to eat._

Link has survived since waking on mushrooms and apples and, on one particularly dreadful evening, raw acorns. After that -- at the old man’s suggestion -- he’d rustled up some fish; he’d considered taking his bow and arrow to the Forest of Spirits for some meat, but something struck him as blasphemous about the idea of hunting if he wasn’t truly starving, the same part of him that hesitated before taking an axe to a tree.  
  
Besides, there was something grand and terrible lurking in that forest, a stone monster that had risen out of the ground when he stepped too close. There was a river to its north that had sapped the life from his lungs when he waded in too deep, and horrible decayed machines in the ruins to the east, whose gaze belied certain death. It is not a particularly pleasant world that he had woken to -- but the forest glowed in greens and blues at night, and the river produced spires of ice that caught the sun in a beautiful way if you looked at them from the right angle, and there was peace in those old ruins, a stone wall to rest one’s back upon and soak in the warm afternoon sun, if you could find a place to hide. The world has monsters but its monsters love their homes, and they do not give chase.  
  
Not particularly pleasant. Those woods would eat you alive if they so pleased.  
  
Very nice, though.

And for his pain, the night gives him a shooting star. From his vantage point sitting atop the south Peak it seems to land somewhere far to the north, where the volcano belches a bright ray of light. He supposes he’ll have to go there eventually. No doubt someday he’ll stand on that mountain and look back to the Duelling Peaks and the unknown thing will have become known.

* * *

  
Link stumbled into Kakariko Town quite by accident -- did not take road that wound up from the Stable, did not arrive austere and purposeful on horseback like he supposed a hero ought to do; he’d been investigating Bonooru’s Stand, loping up and around those strange fingerlike mountains, and had caught sight of something glowing in the woods beneath him. It was a Shiekah pedestal and, unable to find the orb that belonged there, he’d marked it off as a curiosity to return to and had allowed himself to be distracted by what appeared to be an enormous cactus to the west; and then to be distracted by a Great Fairy’s demand for lizard tails, which she devoured with relish; and then to be distracted by the sight of the bevvy of fairies flitting about the nightshade and Silent Princesses, the blupees, the fireflies, the night sky; then, he’d been drawn over the hill by the sound of someone singing, and the Slate had announced the presence of a shrine, where he goes to converse with Ta’loh Naeg. He’d intended to continue west to Sahasra Slope but had stumbled into the village proper instead, where the Shiekah welcomed him with a surprise that gave way to shock that gave way to gratitude.  
  
(“If only you’d come by the customary roads,” Impa had bemoaned, chastising him gently in a way he supposed only a grandmother could. “We had been waiting for you, ever since word came up from the Necludas that the children were feeling the urge to adventure again...”

She tells him about Divine Beasts anyways, then reminds him -- not so gently -- that he must not tarry, that time is of the essence.

So he scales the cliffs of Lantern Falls.

He buys pumpkins, meanders into the graveyard, disappears into Sahasra Slope and comes back with a nasty circular burn on his shoulder.  
  
He cooks a dinner of pumpkin stewed with milk and goats’ butter and disappears into the woods behind town. He saunters back into town and throws off his shirt and shoes, wades into the pond by Impa’s hut and chases fireflies by the statue of the Goddess Hylia.

Is he stalling? He shouldn’t waste time like this, not when the shadow of the Calamity looms over them, and he’s already wasted one hundred years.)

Impa marks vague locations on the Slate, which has likewise forgotten most of the map of the world; she marks Purah’s laboratory, somewhere farther yet east, hoping she’s still there; she asks him if he has any questions. He wonders who or what buried all those monks’ desiccated remains in the ground, and why they did it, and why they passed on once he visited them, and if it was all for him; and how rude it is to write all that suffering into the earth just for one person, and if he should fear whoever did that more than he fears the vague red thing perched on Hyrule Castle; but there is no time for frivolous questions, not when there’s a world to be saved.

Link climbs to the roof of Impa’s hut and chews on an apple and listens to Paya singing and ponders the sight of Mount Lanayru. The Shiekah treat him with kindness and aloof curiosity but after a spell Link, finding the company of people tiresome once again, departs north to the ruins of the Promenade.

* * *

  
“I think you’re different now,” Purah says, in a rare moment of solemnity that belies her age and the terrible things she has survived. “I think the kid we put in the shrine one hundred years ago and the kid you are now are two different people.”

Link, to his great credit, finds himself in agreement; he has the strangest feeling that the Princess’ knight died in there, and that whoever he is now -- that person was born the moment he heard his name and opened his eyes. There’s a dusty attic in his head with someone’s old memories, and a stranger occupies the house.

He buys the home in Hateno.

(North of Hateno Town is Mount Lanayru and, ignoring Purah’s claims that his memories are scattered things that ought to be collected with urgency, Link climbs the mountain hand-over-hand. Nearly dies in the process, too, from exposure and hunger and a particularly nasty Lynel, but the white-cold wind that cuts his lungs to ribbons is worth it for the view of Hateno far below him. At its peak is something truly, utterly terrible, the likes of which Link cannot even begin to comprehend. Is it a Divine Beast? No, it cannot be --)

* * *

  
If there was a girl named Mipha who loved him, he cannot recall; but for a brief flash of memory he had in the Promenade of five strangers on the eve of the apocalypse, she is unknown to him.

“She had a ferocity to her,” Sidon admits, as the two of them take in the sight of her statue, “Most unbecoming of a princess. Father and I could not hide our disappointment when Hyrule chose her and not me. I was a guppy and a fool, then. She told me that she loved a Hylian whose heart only had room for his duty. I told her to show him that she loved her duty as much as he did, and so when the time came she went up into the belly of Vah Ruta...”

He is sorry that she died.

“...You Hylians are strange creatures. So -- small-toothed, and so short-lived. I wonder if that is why you are so brave, living with the urge to achieve greatness before your time runs out.”

Not for the first time Link wonders what it would feel like to have lived as long as Sidon, the length of his life spanning the Calamity and whatever it was that followed, as the world slowly fell into ruin. Would he hate the sight of Hyrule Field, its buildings torched and gutted? Would he hold contempt for the Zora the same way they held contempt for him, for the way one hundred years had turned them inwards, stagnated them, made their hearts and their Domain inhospitable to outsiders?

The thought of growing old and weary and learning to hate something he loves brings a lump to his throat and he swallows, soundlessly, around it. Sidon is talking about Mizu and how the elders will come around when they see what Link can do with his dry skin and his sturdy heart. Link is distracted by the strained sound of a flute and the distinct feeling that he doesn’t belong.

\-- But despite everything there is still the Champion’s duty. He pulls his hood over his eyes against the driving, driving rain and turns his gaze upwards to Shatterback Point.

* * *

  
The mountain, as it turns out, is called Death.

Link liked it far better as a vision in the distance than as a lived experience.

(The climb is brutal; the heat, nearly intolerable. The combination leaves him nauseous and unsettled. Half the trouble of climbing the mountain is keeping all those Fireproof Elixirs from making a hasty and messy exit -- he grits his teeth and swallows bile and reminds himself, over and over again, that if he vomits he’ll likely burn to death. It’s a thoroughly unpleasant thought. Despite the promise that magic works as intended, his skin reddens and blisters, his lips crack, his throat dries up.

It’s almost pathetic that he thought quaffing a drink could save him from the fury of an active volcano.

Nothing could possibly hope to improve the taste of a lizard mashed with Hinox toenail.)

And yet, for all his misery, for all his blisters and burns, the world grants him a reprieve: a small hot spring just north of Goron City. In the shadow of Death Caldera he strips off his armor and carefully toes his way into the pool, watches with absent interest as a layer of grime seeps out of his pores, revealing scars and fresh wounds and an absurdly uneven tan, patches of frostbite, the way his ribs show through his skin. He sits in boiling water stinking of sulphur for what feels like hours and soaks away his misery as he eats his way through an entire chicken with great relish.

In those moments the sight of Death Mountain is beautiful and not horrible; the waxing moon is just a moon, and not the looming threat of the Blood Moon; Hyrule Castle burns strange and inarticulate, but without malice. When the bones are licked clean he snaps them open and sucks each dry of marrow before tossing them over his shoulder, where they burst into flame immediately after hitting the ground.

It would be easy enough to slip into the Slate and reappear somewhere a little more pleasant -- the woods west of Hateno, perhaps, or he could waste another day among the perpetual autumn-coloured birches in Akala.

(He’s done it so many times, slipped into the Slate and reappeared in a cloud of blue light somewhere else. It’s a strange and terrifying bit of magic, that teleportation spell -- always trusting that it will place him where he wants, with all of him intact. What if some ill-meaning monk decided to leave a piece of him behind, like a leg, or an arm, or his eyes, or his sense of purpose?)

He shouldn’t be stalling like this, of course. The look in Impa’s eyes had said as much when he’d taken the better part of a day collecting stray Cuccos around Kakariko. If he had once been burdened by purpose and focused in his duty -- well. That person died one hundred years ago.

Until morning, then. He’ll drink his Fireproof Elixir and climb the caldera in the morning, to face Vah Rudania’s wrath, and whatever vagaries destiny has at work for him this time.

* * *

  
To the north of Gut Check Rock is a massive crevasse with no apparent bottom, and beyond that, a rolling landscape that extends far into the horizon. Consumed with a desire to see the land beyond the northernmost border on the Slate he’d climbed to the top of Tumlea Heights and forced down an Enduring Elixir, unfurled the king’s old cloth and took a running leap into the air, pushed himself northward, northward, ignoring the massive labyrinth to the east despite the Slate’s urges that there was something worth finding there; he’d come back later.

A gust of wind, out of nowhere, picks up, pushing him south. He leans into it, one body against an entire world, tucks his feet in to slice through the air the same way he’d sliced up a waterfall with Mipha’s heart tucked under his chin. There’s a strange emotion in his throat as the wind rises -- is the world fighting back at him? Can wind have emotions, and if so, why is it so disturbed by one man going north?

Between the Akala Sea and the great crevasse there’s a small plateau where he alights himself gently, the wind dying as soon as his sailcloth is folded back up. Directly north there’s a stone spire; he’ll climb that, and according to the Slate it should take him to the hills beyond --

 _You can’t go any further,_ a voice or a thought or a compulsion says in him, and his feet stop in their tracks.

He tries again, with the same results.

How strange that the edge of the world should be marked by a thought in his head. Something -- or someone -- must have put that thought in there, another stranger in his attic who lives there to compel him to do what he is supposed to do. His duty is behind him, and it would seem as though he cannot leave Hyrule until it is done. He has half a mind to build a camp here, lay himself to sleep at the boundary of his world where his feet whisper _this is all there is! Turn back! You can’t go any further._

There is, however, a labyrinth to investigate.  
  
He turns back.

* * *

  
Eventually Link finds it within himself to climb back up Mount Lanayru and discovers that the thing there is not a Divine Beast. He knows better, now, what to expect from the world; natural phenomena inhabit an entirely different sphere from Shiekah technology, and the thing that suffers there is a dragon.

Some strange emotion takes over him as he watches Naydra emerge from the peak, seething with Malice, consumed by sadness. There’s that same sort of sadness in him. He has focus, but also numbness; more importantly, he thinks he’s seen this before. He hears a distant melody on Naydra’s wind. He reaches to his hip for an elixir he’d made by distilling sizzlewing butterflies -- it’s spicy, reminds him of the dinner he’d had with the Gorons after calming Rudania. 

(Goddesses above, it was dark in there.)  
  
Naydra cries out and launches itself heavenward. An updraft catches in his nose and slices his lungs with sharp, cold air.  
  
(Link sleeps like an animal, fitfully, in short bursts, easily woken by light or by noise. He huddles for warmth in caves and, on occasion, ties himself seated upright in tree branches. Even then there is always the light of the moon.)  
  
Carefully, carefully, he notches his bow.

(There was no darkness like the darkness in Vah Rudania’s belly. Such an absence of light could only be wrought by humanoid hands, or by evil; no force of nature blots out the sun in its entirety. It reminded him of -- it reminded him of _\--_ )

* * *

  
The Blood Moon rises once again.

_\-- Be careful, Link._

The first Blood Moon he’d ran for cover and cowered in abject terror, not knowing why the sky had suddenly begun to race, nor why the moon was burning red. It had happened so soon after his awakening, but long enough that he’d foolishly thought he understood Hyrule and its whims -- but then the Calamity came frothing out of Hyrule Castle, and Zelda’s voice had lanced like an arrow into his head.

But now with the bitter wisdom of experience he knows better than to fear a blood-red sky. The midnight apex of the Calamity is cyclical; it reappears infrequently, like the change of seasons; it is almost, in a strange, strange way, like an old friend.

Each time it rises, things return to how they were before: the monsters, yes, but also the cut grass, and the mushrooms in the shade of Hateno’s woods, and the weapons scattered about in the ruined battlefield east of the Duelling Peaks. The sun rises the morning after with the fresh scent of spring and a rebirth, a new beginning, the world returned to exactly what it was when he awoke.

Is that not --

* * *

The bird was a Divine Beast. Of course it was. The mysteries of the world are like the tides receding at his feet. He still keeps a pictograph of it on the Shiekah Slate taken from the Great Plateau, its strange magnificence haloed by the evening sky.

The Rito avoid Hebra and its bone-eating cold but Link, stupidly, courageously, goes looking for things in dangerous places. Far more interesting than a Divine Beast is the ancient monstrosity’s bones tucked away in Hebra, hidden away like a prize to be found, a shrine in its belly. He spends some hours examining wind-bleached bones wondering what, exactly, could kill a whale of that size and leave its carcass mouldering at that horrible edge of Hyrule.

There’s something like that in Eldin, too. Was Hyrule once one great ocean, or did whales of this size once wander about in the skies, held aloft by wings, or by thoughts?

Eventually his stomach rumbles and he realizes it’s gone dark, and grown bitterly cold. He’ll die with his feet frozen to the ground if he stays in the shadow of the beast much longer, and someday a hero braver than him will find his bones, bleached white against the snow, or against whatever thing Hebra has become by then.

(Lanayru was, after all, once a desert; and before that, a sea.)

* * *

  
\-- _Is that not good?_

Link, who awoke with nothing but a voice in his head and the thought that perhaps if he held a branch at the right angle it might stand for a sword, ponders a thought.

It occurs to him as he steps onto the crest of Oakle’s Navel in the midst of a thunderstorm, a burned-violet sky arcing white light above him, the terrifying crackle in the pit of his stomach, the feel of static electricity on the fine hairs on his arm, the way it feels to be hungry and tired and soaked to the skin. He’d been looking for a hot spring rumoured to be in the area for no reason in particular; the Shiekah Slate was silent on matters of anything important. He is wasting time.

It’s a slow-chewing thought, the kind of thoughts he has while he sits atop mountains roasting apples to spite the cold, collecting stray Koroks, waiting for stars to fall. He’d mulled a few of them on horseback, several as he drifted on a current of air towards the shrine on the island south of Hateno, pondered one particularly spectacular thought as he sat atop Gut Check Rock, watching Dinraal drift up into the sky -- that was the day that he thought that  perhaps Hyrule was just a little pocket of the world that he could not leave, his journey nothing but a tiny little test; that all things in Hyrule perhaps might one day be known to him, the enormous world turned pathetic and small.

And yet, it has so many crevices, things to discover.

* * *

  
Satori Mountain burns green on certain nights, like courage, or like death. Link has long since learned to trust his curiosity with his life. He tugs on the Sheikah gear and creeps up, quietly, into the cold, over the peak.

(He is not ready.)

It turns to look at him, regardless of his intentions. In its four eyes Link finds himself pinned to the ground like a butterfly, or like a word on a page; he’s awash quite suddenly with strange visions of a city in the sky hanging perilously to an old, old curse; there are terrible things that creep out of liminal spaces, like twilight, or the place where the sea meets the shore, or waking moments, or Termina; the stars that fall from the heavens are not meteors but gifts.  
  
(He is asleep.)

Botrick had said that the Lord of the Mountain knows everything about Hyrule but in its old, old eyes Link sees _more_ than everything, knows that the Lord of the Mountain knows what lies in the foothills beyond Hyrule, knows what the Calamity dreams of, knows what -- or who -- sleeps in the Master Sword. It makes Link wonder if he had ever really been in control of his own destiny, or if destiny had led them down a single path to this moment; if there was some grand plan out there for him and Zelda and the Calamity and the Sheikah and everyone in Hateno Village and all the deer in the Forest of Spirits; that this great plan somehow included them all, on a deep and personal level.

(He will be sleeping for seven years.)

It knows. It knows because it is unbound by time, and to it the entire world is nothing more than a book, or a game whose pieces may be arranged in any way at its leisure; it knows how the story began and it knows how it will all end, who or live and who will die; it knows his story from his birth, and it knows – just as intimately, he is certain – how he will die.

( _I am who I am because of you._ )

Then something shifts and the Lord of the Mountain and all the blupees at its feet turn to the east: it’s the sun, arriving once again. It tilts its head, its gaze solemn and unblinking and full of pity, and vanishes into the wind.  
  


* * *

  
She’s still there, waiting for him in the heart of the Lost Woods, past the torchlight puzzle and the things that laugh in the mist, sleeping at the foot of the old tree. She has always been there, the cold-butter voice inside the Sword, as old as the myth of the Hero.

For his pain the Tree gives him a gift: a memory that is not his. In his head the Great Deku Tree plants the image of his Zelda leaving the Sword behind. It gives a little continuity to the dead Champion’s story.

Say, for example, you take a boy of nine years and give him a fairy, and then you send him off to his destiny; he’s not ready for her, not yet. So you take him somewhere safe and rock him to sleep for seven years, and inside that long dream you create for him a landscape with its own gods and demons, its own Zelda, its own Great Deku Tree. If he can survive that -- well, then the boy that wakes will be ready to tackle a world that the Calamity has swallowed whole.

It’s a decent enough idea, and a very nice dream.

* * *

  
At the bleak edge of the world, the southwest corner of the Gerudo Wasteland where the sand gives way to that old compulsion to turn back, are the bones of a Wind Fish, a sky-dreamer. It is in the shadow of that carcass that Link comes to realize that despite everything the dream will soon end. There are two sections of his Slate yet to be filled, by his reckoning; there is one Divine Beast left to be tamed. Then there will be nothing but the Calamity, and beyond that --

Well, one thing at a time. There is still Urbosa’s regret to ease, and the jungle to the east, where perhaps he’ll finally find Farosh. Courage at last.

He is, come to think of it, badly sunburnt. Very hungry. Quite tired. He could bury himself in the sand and quietly pass away, if the world would let him. There are shadows under his eyes he doesn’t think he had before, and deep fissures in his spirit he can’t remember earning. He’s not wet-tired, the tired of watery eyes and deep yawns; he’s dry-tired, the tired of sore shoulders and heavy hearts, that sort of exhaustion that creeps in and makes its home between one’s ribs.

To duty, then, he thinks, pulling out the Slate.

If he cannot die then he’ll spirit himself back to Gerudo Town and spring for a night at the inn. He slips to Hateno and buys milk, to the Rito village for butter, to the heart of Death Mountain for a bevvy of spices, buys salt and wheat and an outrageously expensive side of beautifully marbled gourmet water buffalo meat from a sharp-eyed Gerudo lady. Then he takes everything  to a communal soup pot and cooks an absurd amount of curried stew and eats it all. By his fourth bowl it’s nearly midnight and he’s drawn a crowd; the Gerudo do not sleep, not when an itty-bitty Hylian is stuffing themselves to the gills and requires a little cheering-on. When he keeps it all down he earns a cheer from the throng, and then someone breaks out the Noble Pursuits and a Gerudo lifewater so potent they swear it can strip the paint off a fresco and the whole town comes alive with the spirit that can only be found in the shadow of death, the kind of wholehearted joy that comes from never knowing what tomorrow will bring, a cacophony of noise and music and song and dance and light and love and damnit all, Link can’t help but want to save a world like this.

(And if the Sword has any issues with him using her for support while he stumbles to a bed -- well, she doesn’t say anything.)

He wakes the following evening feeling equal parts stupendous and awful, ready to face the day, but with a hangover the size of Vah Ruta. Strangers slap him on the back as he makes his way to the palace and his dinner repeatedly threatens to make a reappearance. He is Gerudo now, they say, and nothing will ever change that.

“You’re not exactly who I thought you would be,” Riju says, over a repast of salted hydromelon and coffee cooled with goat’s butter. “I thought you would be -- oh, I don’t know. Serious. Joyless.”

He is not serious or joyless. If that man lived a hundred years ago -- Link only has a series of disjointed images in Zelda’s old Slate to confirm that he and that Champion are the same person. For all he knows, the world could have come spontaneously into being the moment he awoke.  
  
“I like this version of you, Hero.”

Riju seems real, though. And whatever happened last night -- well.

She stands, cocks her head in the direction of Vah Naboris. “ -- To duty, then?”

To duty, then.

* * *

  
Maybe it was better that he could not remember. If he had a story he would have woken with his purpose still in his hands, would have turned straight for Hyrule Castle and his certain doom. Instead he woke with a question on his tongue and wonder in his eyes. Without a sense of duty to a king and a crumbling castle he found something else, a deep and unabiding affection for the land itself. The Calamity can seize your weapons, kill your comrades, grind your hope to dust -- but it can never take the earth from below your feet.

Maybe this was all intended, part of a plan or a story much larger than the short length of his life. Maybe it was fate. Maybe the goddesses and the Calamity worked in tandem to build him a world, buried one hundred and twenty monks’ desiccated remains just to teach him a lesson, blew in the gale that always sent him back to work.

Sometimes you can learn the answers to things by watching, sometimes by waiting; other times you resign yourself to the knowledge that there are things for which there are no answers, that at the end of the day one may be subject to the whims of higher powers, and life goes on regardless.

A cool wind blows through the highlands and brings him peace on warm days.

* * *

  
Far to the east of Lurelin Village, past the spring called Courage and the lake of the Horse God, past the waterfall where Farosh is reborn each midnight, past the Palmorae Ruins and the fragmented mirror, is Eventide Island, the dreamer’s vale. Link looks towards the sunrise through a smattering of rain and considers his options, by sea or by sky, before rooting through his pack for the right elixir -- and, finding none, pulls out the Shiekah Slate and slips to Kakiriko. He spends the better part of the morning knee-deep in dewy grass at the base of the Great Fairy Fountain harvesting endura carrots, takes them into town, slices them thin and cooks them with butter and salt and three fresh birds’ eggs. Scoops the whole meal into his shield, grabs a pair of twigs for chopsticks. Then he slips back to Muwo Jeem’s resting place at the top of Cape Cales and sits with his legs dangling over the edge, eating breakfast with his legs swinging back and forth, watching the island and the birds and the horizon and letting his thoughts drift out to sea.

Maybe one day I’ll be a sailor _,_ he thinks. When all of Hyrule is washed away, I’ll find a boat and use the king’s paraglider as a sail _._

And perhaps one day he’ll be a rabbit, or a wolf; but today he is a man, and he has work to do. He finishes the last of his breakfast and wipes the crumbs from his mouth with the back of his hand, feels the weight of a good meal thrumming in his stomach and in his veins, packs everything up and unfurls the paraglider and takes takes a running leap off Cape Cales. He spends the rest of the morning slowly riding a current of wind to the last untouched corner of his world.

_Upon Mount Tamaranch there is an Egg, and in that Egg there is the Dream --_

It is a test, of course. A Sheikah monk with a sense of humour thought it fitting to take all his gear, leave him naked and empty-handed on the shores of an island with nothing but his wits and his knowledge and whatever he could summon out of the Slate.

 _\-- And in the Dream there is Mabe Village, and in Mabe Village there slept the Ocarina --_ _  
_

Goddesses but is it _good_ to do this, to beat monsters back with dull weapons and wooden shields, drive himself to the brink of exhaustion, breathe raw salt air white-hot in burning lungs! To claw at the injustices of a world in chaos with his bare hands!

_\-- but Mabe Village lies now in ruins --_

He’ll miss this chaos once he kills it, when the Blood Moon ceases rising and the world leaves that endless, endless cycle, when the winds stop pushing him back at the edges of Hyrule, when his nightmares are either resolved or slain, when the joy of _work to do_ gives way to the happiness -- if it is really happiness -- of _work done_ ; he’ll miss it, if he can be so honest with himself.

 _\-- that memory must be the real dream world --_  
  
Out of the mountain Korgu Chideh’s shrine asserts itself, bursting from the ground with a cloud of seagulls.

\-- _but verily, it be the nature of dreams to end --_  
  
Perhaps he’ll waste a little more time before he finally turns to the centre of the world.

\-- _We end as we began, with Link’s awakening_.

* * *

Something still lingers in the rafters of the old temple. Rhoam lifts his gaze, blank and pitiless as the sun, and says, _is it time?_

Link shrugs his shoulders, says, _I think there will always be time_. Ganon will always be waiting for him. If the weight of the world makes him slouch, then so be it! He slouches towards Hyrule Castle, and the birth of a new day.

**Author's Note:**

> every flying whale is the wind fish, and every wind fish is a link's awakening reference
> 
> (x-files theme)
> 
> find me doing my thing on [tumblr](http://kanthia.tumblr.com/)


End file.
